A 2.34μJ/scan acoustic power scalable charge-redistribution pMUT interface system with on-chip aberration compensation for portable ultrasonic applications

A 1- to 8-ch scalable pMUT interface system with on-chip aberration compensation is presented for portable ultrasonic imaging applications. The system overcomes the necessity of area and power reduction for large ultrasonic arrays and presents the first hardware implementation on-chip calibration to improve the signal quality. The Charge Redistribution Transmitter (CR-TX) saves power by 32.8% while driving pMUT array at a wide range from 100 kHz to 5MHz. The CR-TX drives up to 500pF/channel load, which is 33× of the state-of-the-art ultrasonic driver reported to date. The on-chip adaptive beamformer supports five different media scans, has channel scalability and features the first demonstration of on-chip aberration compensation. The 8-ch system fabricated in 65nm CMOS occupies the core area of 700×1490μm, TX drives up to 6V while consuming 2.34μJ/scan.